Date: Wed, 12 May 1999 21:04:25 +0800
From: Malcolm Riddoch <riddoch-AT-central.murdoch.edu.au>
Subject: Existential Death


Since no one else is taking this subject up and I need to work up a few
ideas for the last chapter of my thesis I'd just like to toss a few ideas
out to see what the list thinks -

As part of his critique of the second division of BT in _Being in the
World_ Dreyfus suggests that the joyful defamiliarizing angst of death as a
mode of authentic understanding is a strange way to go about disclosing the
existential structure of average everydayness, the point being that we
don't generally go about our everyday work in this mode of feeling (in the
sense of Befindlichkeit). I like Dreyfus' approach here, the existential
analytic is set up to disclose the mundane, the everyday, but when it comes
to its ecstatic temporality everything gets a bit...ecstatic? This early
authentic method doesn't seem to remain with the things themselves as they
give themselves.

And for Heidegger looking back what is actually disclosed in BT is the
fundamental experience of the *oblivion* of being. So I guess angst as a
method is part of this oblivion, and this ties in nicely with his 30's
Nietzsche writings where he starts out by stating that Friedrich basically
got to where BT is founded ie the interpretation of being as time, at least
that's the basic premise at the beginning of his lectures. Yet by the late
30's the ealy optimism about will to power turns into the pessimism of
machination as an obliteration of the open clearing.

But authenticity in the later Heiedgger is still related to Ereignis, only
now it turns on the releasement and silence of Gelassenheit. My difficulty
with BT is that these themes, die Lichtung, silence and letting be are
already there in the existential analytic, but they're tied up with this
strangely willful anticipatory mode of authentic angst.

So I've been wondering if there's another way of interpreting angst here,
one that remains faithful to the later Heidegger's method and that doesn't
require me to work up a defamiliarizing joyful freedom towards death but
instead approaches death with more of a sense of ... piety maybe? Might the
humility of angst offer authentic access to ecstatic temporality and its
openness?

Any thoughts would be welcome.

Malcolm Riddoch



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